The long flat road

25 August 2011 | Fakarava, Tuamotus, French Polynesia

Catherine

After a successful morning of school, we dinghied the bikes over to land. Shall we go left or right, we wondered. For there is only one road and it's very long and very flat. We opted for right, which halfway along took us from the sheltered lagoon to the windy ocean on the other side. The beaches are made up completely of coral – gorgeous white pieces of coral. All the houses, instead of having gravel in their drives have drives made up from coral. Most of the decorations are beautiful pieces of coral hanging down from a string, of which Mia has now made plenty for our boat! We met a lovely family on holiday with one son. He approached us to ask where we were staying, and I spoke my best French to him, completely baffling him and me in the process. Why couldn't he understand 'bateau,' my accent isn't that bad! Are you French? I ask. No Italian. OK, so that explains the confusion. His parents spoke English a little so it was nice to chat and the kisd got on really well, so, we invited them to come and see the boat and to take them to 'our' coral patch at the back of the boat tomorrow. When we got back to the boat, it was nice to see Luna, a catamaran we first saw in Galapagos and we popped over to say hello and for the kids to play. They told us that the Southern pass is phenominal for fish, so I think we'll be heading there in the next couple of days.

Having met whilst sailing on Bob's boat, there always was a vague plan that we would at some stage sell the house, buy a boat and sail round the world. Unfortunately, we didn't have a house. That was 9 years ago. [...]Now we have sold the house we did buy, and we got married and had kids (in that order - just!) Mia is now 7 and Lochy is nearly 6, so it seems a good time to haul them out of school whilst I still understand the maths they're doing. We may be taking on other crew members along the way - if they can put up with the Jackson Four!!